Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)

you were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook I imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering that people don't often hear about I didn't sleep for more than 4 hours at a time I had to wake up every 4 hours and check the report and see if anyone was attacking the site they don't tell you about that stuff in the movies you worked 120 hours per week you had no Hobbies I don't want to take away from the Romanticism of it it's just that it's most often we hear those romantic stories from the succ

esses it's a healthy thing for people to want to throw themselves into something and take that risk but it is not glamorous like at the time the news feed that was one of your early projects at Facebook people did not want it they were wrong Clearly Now Newsfeed was an easier case Than People suspect everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product in terms of the economic utility the vend diagram of boss of Newsfeed and ads create a trillion dollars

of value today my guest is Andrew Bosworth or BOS as most people know him BOS is the chief technology officer of meta he joined what was then called Facebook in early 2006 as one of the first engineers and during his 18-year tenure at meta he created some of the most impactful and important products in Internet history including the Facebook news feed which was the first ever algorithmically ranked content feed of any social network and is basically what people think of as Facebook today he also

built the original Facebook mobile ads platform which he then ran for another four years he also helped build and scale the Facebook messaging system the profile the timeline Facebook groups and even the internal engineering boot camp most recently he served as VP of ads and business platform where he led engineering product research analytics and design and in 2017 he created the company's AR VR organization now called reality Labs these days Andrew leads meta's efforts in AR VR and mixed real

ity along with consumer Hardware across Quest Rayband meta smart glasses and More in our wide ranging conversation we touch on so many important lessons and stories what it was really like in the early days of Facebook why you should be asking your manager for help more often why communication is the job lessons for meta turnaround over the past couple years Bosa thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro a bunch of leadership and career advice what it was like to build the very first news feed and lesson

s from that experience and stories of failure and stories of success and so much more if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Andrew Bosworth AKA boss after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by vanta when it comes to ensuring your company has top-notch security practices things get com

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$1,000 off vanta when you go to vana.com Lenny that's v.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of airbeam be and snowflake for modern growth teams companies like twitch Muro clickup and DraftKings r on EPO to power their experiments experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features an EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unl

ocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does when I was atbb one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own EPO does all that and more with Advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytic Cy

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've been putting out so I'm glad to finally get a chance to join same I'm really excited to have you here I have at least a billion questions I want to ask you but I want to start with a few fun facts that I've found about you and what if I go through them and then just pick one that stands out and then tell the story behind it how does that sound all right sounds good okay you went to 14 proms yeah okay I'm gonna keep going okay wow that's a strong opener I might be the Run uh your nation tawan

do champion in college you were Mark Zuckerberg's T College in a class on AI which isn't actually how you landed at Facebook for my understanding uh Harvard was recruiting you to play football for them you were very active in the 4 club and you raised animals and showed them at county fairs when you were growing up you once shared a stage with David Copperfield that's true MC Hammer once told you that your outfit was stylish and President George W bush complimented you on your shoes and the shi

ne of your head yeah these are all these are all true I I want to say Wow first of all I got to make sure people understand I was a national clate champion in as a green belt which like a very that's like being the JV Champion just soever just so everyone's clear on what that is heavyweight heavyweight sparring uh uh I I'll tell the the prom story is a funny one it's related to the 4 story it was a big time 4er uh National forage kind of Hall of Fame did all the stuff there as a con to that I wa

s you know it's C forage is wonderful program youth program it's a co-ed program and I was all over the state all over the country doing you know leadership events and doing these conferences and doing a lot of public speaking and almost every 4 each event has a dance don't know that they have like at the end of like the conference at the end of the of the literally like Camp you you go camping for a week at the end there's a dance and so as a consequence the most important thing if you want to

go to a lot of proms I was a good dancer and it turns out when like the high level bit at least in the 1990s for girls selecting who they might want to go to prom with was will he and can he dance and the answer with me was yes and combined that with the fact that I knew a bunch of uh girls who went to different schools that's the recipe for Success right there if that's if that's the goal that somebody has to my junior year and and 12 my senior year I went went to three in one weekend uh a Frid

ay a Saturday and a Sunday night another fun fact about you is you were basically the 10th engineer at Facebook initially way before it was a clear success story I imagine there was a lot of pain and suffering and struggle that people don't often hear about those early days they see a movie like The Social Network it looks like oh that was so much fun I got to start a company it's going to be become a trillion dollar success story I'm curious just what those early days were like or there memorie

s that stand out to you yeah there's a bit of a joke in the 10th thing which is me and five other guys all joined at the same time and there was nine people nine injuries before us we joined the same day so we're all the 10th engineer so somewhere between 10 and 16 depending on how you want how you want to do the numeration on that I've heard this about this my blog and I tell this story a lot which is um we it was fun and there was tremendous camaraderie and you know memories that were formed b

ut they were formed in a kind of a forge of really intense times you know at that time almost all of us lived within one mile of the office we ate most of our meals together because we were working not be not say that we weren't also friends but like because we were working it's like oh cool it's like just roll into a meal and roll back into work and there's little things that you don't appreciate which is like there was nobody to help you there was no expert and so it wasn't like hey I'm strugg

ling with this one tricky problem who should I talk to it's like nobody you should talk to yourself and figure this out or it's like oh man like my servers are out of capacity it's like cool you should go to Fries electronics you should buy a bunch of components you should build a new server and then you should run it uh like maybe drive into the Colo Racket and then get back and run it that people really undervalue the fact that when you go to work even a moderate midsize Corporation today espe

cially with the tremendous growth of startups supporting startups things like payroll and finance and it and HR and you know these things are professionally handled in many cases that was just not the case in the early 2000s it was just like you and like your personal car and like whatever you wanted to do with your time so I don't want to take away from the Romanticism of it it's just that it's most often we hear those romantic stories from the successes we so rarely hear somebody who went thro

ugh really sacrificing a lot of my 20s from any kind of social or you know like outgoing fun environment it paid off for me so no one feels bad for me nor should they but there are other people who do the exact same thing maybe they worked harder maybe they were smarter maybe they did better and it didn't play out for them and it's a big sacrifice and so I I I like I love that people I love the enthusiasm for startups I love startup culture I think it's a it's a healthy thing for people to want

to throw themselves into something and take that risk but it is not glamorous like at the time time in retrospect it's like oh we can be we like we have a little halo around it but at the time it doesn't feel glamorous yeah and this post you mentioned you said that you worked 120 hours per week you had no hobbies and you gained a lot of weight and you and yeah we Dr we drank a lot to make to make up for so I gain up a lot yeah and you weren't eating healthy I it was it was it was crazy there's a

time I think I I tell this before there was a time where one of the first things I built was an anti- spam kind of anti-scraping defense me mechanism but we didn't have any op support there was no like 247 online support so I built this tool I had to wake up every four hours for about two years I didn't sleep for more than four hours at a time I had to wake up every four hours and check the report and see if anyone was attacking the site and if they were I was up and I had to go battle back and

if they weren't cool I'd go back to sleep but that's not they don't tell you about that stuff in the movies you know that's like worse almost as wor worse than having a kid a new a newborn and nobody asked me to do it it was just like I that was like I took it nobody even asked me to do the anti- spam anti scraping stuff I just like that was a problem and I went and and did that that was the solution I come if I was a better engineer maybe I'd have solved a better problem but so maybe just to c

lose out that thread when you talk to Founders what advice do you give them along these lines I want to be cautious about this because I you know what I tell the first thing I tell Founders is that I've never been a founder and I want to recognize the difference like you know I joined in January 9th 2006 that's almost 2 years after started the company I didn't have to do I wasn't involved with fundraising I didn't have to do any of that side of things and I didn't have to deal with you know the

board or or like the business side of things I really was lucky in a way to have joined when I did that's the first thing I tell Founders is like you should take my advice with a grain of salt I have not actually been in your shoes if I can compliment you really one of the things I like about your program is there's a whole uh system of Professionals in our industry and I was when I grew up in technology in the valley right uh you always heard about like the ACM right the association of computin

g Machinery you heard of these legendary professional organizations that supported people in our fields and by the nature the rapid pace of change in the technology and the nature of the engagement of those institutions even academics even Academia broadly kind of are out of touch that the tools that you got from those places weren't useful in our field so I do think the mentorship that we give each other has been a critical and sustaining res resource there is today now resources like your uh y

our your podcast and your newsletter that are actually really designed to help people who are Professionals in our industry in a way that has almost kind of missing for 15 20 years and I love to see that because if you're an upand and cominging Pian literally used you used to have to know somebody and ask them a question and so a lot of times what I'm helping founders with I can help them with the strategy I can help them think through the technology choices I can through business I can think th

rough the management the organization structure but I also try to be very clear there's a bunch of stuff that I just was never had to expose it so even as we just talk about how tough it was for the average engineer joining you know Facebook in 2006 man it was even tougher for Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 probably and that's not that's a story that's been told I'm sure but still so I think these are both it's just like it's almost all scale and variant no matter how far you dial back the challenges k

ind of are interesting and are worth talking about when maybe your most popular posts is this quote that you share about the advice you often give what you say is the advice I find I have to give more frequently than any other in my career as a manager a board member an adviser and a friend is to for people to more directly leverage their leaders yeah can you talk about that and what that means and what that looks like it's such a normal and natural healthy thing and by the way we do it in our p

ersonal relationships like I said in the post like we want to do it ourselves we want to do it ourselves to prove to everyone that we can do it ourselves and we think in our heads if I ask for help haven't I already given up that goal haven't I just admitted the feet on one of my top level goals which is to demonstrate that I can do it myself but what's so often we forget is like more often than not your job is not to do it yourself your job is to get it done is to have the thing done done well

done right done competently and a lot of times the tools that you need to do that live with your your manager with your partner with your advisor uh with your Mentor like that's where they live so it's like you know how many times as a manager have I gone through and somebody's you know I've told them here's the job they're like I got it they go off they come back it's done it's wrong and I'm not blaming them for it being wrong they didn't check in with me they misunderstood we miscommunicated I

'll take the L on that that's no problem but here we are six months later it's not done right because they they misunderstood the brief we miscommunicated the brief or they come back and it took a year and I'm like why did this take a year instead of six months and they're like oh man I had all these things I had to deal with where if they had emailed me I could have bulldozed that stuff I could have cleared the path I could have said oh no no no don't worry about that this is the thing and then

we'd have been done six months sooner and they would have been less frustrated and so light touches now I do think as a manager we also have a job to say Hey you know that's kind of the that's kind of the work so you gotta G to go figure that out and one of my things I always tell my managers one of the most powerful things we do is refuse to rule someone will bring me a thing a lot of times we feel obligated to like weigh in and help I'll be like no look uh like I think you got it like I think

the challenges your faing are the right challenges I think you're approaching it in the right way like just do your best there and like that's what it is and so there is a responsibility as well for those of us who are leaders mentors advisers board members to do that but by the way we do this have personal relationships right like you're with your partner and you're trying to do something the right way but you're not talking to them about it you're just taking a huge risk there and for very li

ttle reward like they're not gonna be mad if you ask them like hey do you want is is this how you wanted it done like I don't know and so I do think it's kind of funny uh how much we build these castles in our mind these little silos that keep us from engaging the structures that are built around us that are designed to help us succeed I saw this great quote actually just uh yesterday I saw Patrick Stewart uh who was one of my favorite actors of all time and whose characters I love and he talked

about people going on casting calls and this is a brutal thing for actors right you're going on 30 40 things you're getting rejected it's tough everyone's kind of heard about this and he said no one wants you to succeed more than the person you are auditioning for cuz they want you to be awesome because as soon as you're awesome they're done like they want you to be amazing that's like your manager you nobody wants you to be more awesome than your manager does because when you're amazing your m

anager his life gets easier her life gets easier so I just think that's like the mentality we get into is like no no no like they're testing me they're not they are rooting for you I promise you that I love that advice I imagine the reason people don't do this as you said is they don't want their man that think they don't know what they're doing or they can't solve it do you have any advice and guidance for when it makes sense to go reach out and ask one of the things I think for people who are

timid about this especially is I think you can put a framing around it that's really easy for your manager to like engage with you can say like hey I'm making progress on this this is what I'm blocked on this is the current program and I'll even say like hey if this all looks good to you no response required if there is something here that you want me to do better different that you think you could help with you know let me know I love like a a tight you know like a five 10 sentence email no res

ponse required here's where things are even if I even if everything is going really well I feel like cool this is a this is a this person understands the urgency they understand the assignment and they're giving me a little heartbeat a little pinging back and then also if two weeks later let's say the blocking issue is bad then you say hey hey I am sorry but I do actually need your help now I'm actually blocked on this thing I have the context you like I have a mental model of you uh you know to

iling away on the right thing on the thing I asked you to do over there even then when you're blocked you can make my life super easy like hey what I'd love for you to do if you could send an email to this person here's a draft with like this thoughts that would help or it's like here's here are specific questions framed up like I think this is you want is this right yes or no if no okay we'll come back we'll spend more time if yes we're all good it makes it so it's now it's like not only am I u

p to speed I have a mental model I'm engaged also you've made it super cheap for me to help you I just like takes and people are always surprised people people who work for me are always surprised when I tell them how big a part of my job is doing these little types of things it's a little spinning plates at my scale I I've got 10 or 15,000 employees depending on how you want to count different things and so you're just like I every now and then I got to get a whole new plate a whole new rod and

really put the effort into it for the most part I'm just like trying to touch everything and keep the momentum going and so if something Falls and somebody didn't tell me that hey we're losing rotational velocity here we got we're losing momentum oh I'm bummed I'm like a now that plate fell I got to start a whole new thing over here now so I I think people just underestimate they think of my job differently than my job actually my job is actually tons of little touches so I think a key takeaway

here is one index more towards asking your manager and leaders for help and I love this way of framing it of doesn't always need to be like here's what I need from you it's here's what's happening here's things that might be blocking me here's questions I have here's things that are going on this is actually similar to something I found really powerful that I'll share real quickly this idea of a a state of I call it the state of Lenny email and I sent this email to my manager every week the sta

te of Lenny it's kind of like State of the Union and it's uh here's my current priorities here's what's on my mind broadly and then here's blockers that I need your help with we we actually used to have a format for that we called um hpms high like people me um and every manager at Facebook from like 2008 to like 2014 would send to their manager or even their leadership group I mean at one point when I was running what we called com apps I just sent it to like Zuck and the whole leadership group

it's like what's the highlights includ and it highlights FL slow light like what's the big things you need to know where are people like is somebody in trouble is somebody at risk is somebody doing really amazing work that needs a shout out and then me how are you personally doing hpms we call them actually it's funny I hadn't thought about that in a long time but yeah I think this kind of thing can work and look every manager is different so you that's even at the meta level by the way is anot

her success another people think people do is they want to treat every manager the same and that's not going to work because different manager are different so but every manager you can ask how do you like to get updates like you can ask them when you first start working with them like hey like what's your Cadence like how do you like how do you like to stay informed and so for me like I do regular one-on ones as I've gotten the org has gotten bigger those have gotten more distant so people have

replaced those with more written things but like no manager will get pissed if you it's like how do you like to get information about me like that's a totally reasonable thing to ask I love the specific idea you shared of just like drafting the email to say the other team leader of like here's what I need you to tell them that would really unblock this thing that's such a cool idea by the way and and I always put my own I I don't take that copy paste it like how you know I'm always looking at t

hat and be like okay I a lot of it is actually not about what you want the other person to hear it's about like the voice the tone it includes a lot of history I don't know have you been going back in Forth with them for 12 rounds and this is going to feel to them like I'm really coming over the top or is this like hey first time you're hearing about this my bad like here's what we're doing need your help so a lot of that isn't even about oh here making my life easy because I want to copy pasted

a lot of it is actually there's a rich set of information in how you tone and how you draft that note that's going to help me land it correctly and not feel like I'm just out of band you know heavy coming in this touches on something that I often hear is very core to the way meta Works which is transparency anyone can ask Zuck questions at the q&as people are encouraged to post constantly internally of what they're thinking what they're working on all the data is shared publicly which often lea

ds to leaks which I I hear you're very uh you hate and that is a pet Pew of yours just feels like a violation of the team trust just feels like I I I grew up playing sports I was football soccer track and like you just can't imagine one of your guys like calling out the play to the other team it's like can you can you imagine what you would do in that case like I just you're off the team I'm sorry like you can't be here anyways sorry carry on yeah and there's so many more people it's hard to fin

d who is this so with this downside as an example and it's also I mentioned there's other downsides also takes a lot of work and it puts people on the spot a lot of times what have you seen as benefits and why is that such a big part of meta's way of working yeah this kind of comes back to I think the principle that uh really good talented people you want to leverage them fully you really want to make sure that they are fully leveraged and so anytime they have the wrong information or they don't

have the information you've now blocked one of the economically most valuable things that your company possesses which is this person's time attention Talent not only that you've also made them more frustrated and now they like are more likely to leave like if if the if the lifeblood of any company are the people inside of it who collectively commit to some kind of a goal and Mission and work together then like you want to maximize that potential and uh creating this like really open informatio

n ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that so often great phenomenal work that has happened at our company has not come from this one top down mandate but it's come from people understanding not just like what we're trying to accomplish top down but also having way more information uh at at their disposal to be able to act on it and so it's you know it's people talk about top down or Bottoms Up culture it's a bit of a myth in my opinion uh if you've ever met Mark Zuckerberg he is not a it's

not a Bottoms Up thing like the ideas that we're pursuing are Mark Zuckerberg's ideas first and foremost that's not that he's not open to new ones and of course he is and that's a form of bottomup people can bring ideas to him and he internalizes them and and acts them or not but when he brings it things top down he doesn't he's not micromanaging he's in the details I be careful on that but he does create the space for you to bring back three or four versions of the thing that he's talking about

and then he shapes it from there and you can't do that if there's if you don't have degrees of freedom sure but also if you don't have the information otherwise if you don't have the information available what we're trying to accomplish why we're trying to do it what the what the what infrastructure is like what the availabil like what the performance is going to be like well you just are stuck you're just gonna have to follow the script that's very boring for high Talent High creativity High e

ngaged people now it does come at a tremendous price you have to get really good at managing information on the incoming most people and most companies consume all the information that's given to them but the information itself is carefully managed M right like they're getting all the information they're intended to get we've turned that on its head and it sounds great but it's not free even somebody senior coming from outside the company to the company one of the things I have to coach them on

is like how do you find signal amongst all the noise you have to have a system for managing your information uh you have to have a system for triaging the incoming getting rid of a bunch of stuff that is on the wrong Channel or it doesn't matter to you figureing out what's the groups that you want to be a part of but you consume only when you choose to and where are the things where you're getting push notifed like that's the realtime thing and that takes some time this point you made about bott

om up first top down is really interesting because when I think of meta I think it's a very bottom up culture I hear everyone comes up their ideas runs experiments it's very encouraged to just try stuff and it's really interesting to hear that and it makes a lot of sense that most of the Big Ideas actually do come from the top it's a bit it's just like one of these mythology things I don't think it's the wrong as a as a construct it's more Bottoms Up than many other companies because you do have

these degrees of freedom within the construct but like make no mistake like Mark or me or Chris Cox or Javi like have very strong opinions about what we should be doing as a company and you have to your bottoms upness Works within that framework but we also it is true that you can ask Mark any question and he's goingon to answer it same with me same with Chris same with Javi and also that like we certainly take inspiration from the discussion that we have with him employees so it's I don't know

it's it's just not as black and white as people kind of tend to paint it I think one of the biggest lessons here is making it at least feel like you have a lot of say like even though a company is very here's the big strategic pillars we're going you're very good at making people feel like they can have an impact in the say and can I tell you the most important thing is just giving people clear guidelines so they know where they where like where can they where do they have space and where do th

ey have no space you know one of things that we go in these reviews with Mark or my team with me I'm sure and I'm like this is we're like for this part of the UI it is going you're like I will draw it for you it's going to be like this and this other part I'm like cool that's important too I don't have a clear vision of it why don't you do it so you like so there's just really clear guard rails of like okay like where are we just on assignment and where do we have more flexibility is there an ex

ample of that that comes to mind where you just like very in the details and drawing the screen over the over the course of time there's been quite a few examples I think early on when we were working on newsfeed you know Mark was absolutely whiteboarding every single like pixel that you know the team had to put on the front end on the back end he was like make it rank like have some ranking you know so I felt like I was lucky there because I was just like cool like I'm off to the races on some

ranking stuff and like you know all these other Chris Cox and and all these other guys are having to like really pixel match these things but it's not always that way by the way so now fast forward and we're talking about ranking it's not like Marcus always hands off on that when we got into modernizing our ranking systems which we've done over the last five years Mark was heavily involved like hey what's the what's the mix shift and like how are you weighing different things and so you know it

can go both ways for me personally I've gotten really involved uh in kind of some some relatively esic things I was really adamant for example that hand tracking and mix reality make it into the headset doesn't say that there weren't any supporters in the team obviously we had a hand tracking team which is phenomenal mix reality team but like there's a lot of people who were like they did not feel those features were going to be critical for this to become a mainstream device I always believ tha

t they were for ease of use and for so like I just like really forced the issue and didn't give anyone any room and held really high standards for the performance Benchmark so we were going to hit on on the hand tracking and teams told me it was impossible and it wasn't they did great this touches on something that comes up a lot on this podcast and there's this debate between how in the weeds Founders and zec should be whether they delegate Empower versus no we're just going to do it this way I

'm going to be very involved in every Mock and there's always this like up and down that happens where it's like okay cool we're going to let people run and do their thing and then things start to not work as well often and then cool we're going to take Take Back Control you have just a perspective on when it makes sense to go deep how Founders exact should think about that such a useless answer for Founders it depends on the weeds like you know like there are some weeds that really matter and t

here are some weeds that really just don't and I should say like that doesn't mean they don't matter at all you have to do them but like they aren't the the hinge upon which success uh or failure uh will happen yeah like there's people I really respect Brian chesky's been on and said like look the Airbnb is going to work only on the things that I can work on like it's just that's the the extent of what it's going to do and that's a super extreme form of it I have a lot of respect for him and how

they're working things uh I think that like if you have great super talented people that you can trust who can own bigger pieces that's one option if there are ways to structure it so that you can like check in effectively and make sure that it's on track that's another way to structure it and there probably is still work happening at Airbnb that has to happen Finance and Accounting and HR that like Brian isn't personally managing so there are clearly non-technical areas that we do are illegal

there are areas that we already we do trust that this is happening at and so I I think a lot of Founders regret delegating too much from what I you know my conversations and uh I totally get that or they delegated something critical that really turned out to be the most important thing for me the judgment is like how do you most important determine what is what matters the most and so Mark we we we joke inside of meta to this day we call it the eye of Sauron uh when Mark has determined that the

thing that you're working on is the most important thing there is no detail too small for him to notice like uh he will be in a review and in the same review will be like strategically I think we're off course and also this one pixel is is definitely wrong you have to fix that like you know that's a big range and frankly if I I'll be a little bit self congratulated i' probably myself be able to do the same and I think people who work with me often comment that the style of leadership that we hav

e and I think Chris Cox is the same is that where it's like we will go high to low on the things that matter a ton there's a bunch of other things that certainly matter like we're glad we're doing them but either they have pretty clear road maps pretty clear examples in the industry or it's like that's a feature that you have to have but isn't going to determine success or failure so getting it into rough shape and then iterating on it is fine and so that I think it really does depend on the wee

ds how deep you want to get it's so funny I use exactly that same metaphor that I have Sauron when I talk about working on things at Airbnb that matter a lot to Brian and my advice to people is you don't want to be in that ISR on for too long in your career because you're just going to burn out if you're working the most important thing all the time but you want to be close you want to you don't want to be in the Shire but you want to be like around that's right there both uh so I worked for yea

rs in in ads from 2012 2017 I ran ads and business platform this big ads group and uh it was an area where certainly certainly was very important but Mark had so many other things going on with the transition to mobile he did kind of delegate to me and it was awesome and it was so cool to have that kind of you know trust from him and also you constantly terrified because like Mark does not know like what if this is all you know it's like and my my leads be worried like they just had had had a re

view with Mark in a while and it's like yeah you you suffer in the intensity of the Gaze of Sauron you also suffer in the shadow of its absence uh there's no perfect place to be that's hilarious I'm trying to think of like the part of Middle Earth that has a metaphor for that yeah okay so you talked about the newsfeed which was one of your very earliest projects at Facebook here's a couple fun facts I know about the newsfeed one is that it was the very first algorithmic news feed of its kind of

any social network and maybe of any sort of product like this yeah and two is the very first AI code that was written in Facebook to rank the actual Newsfeed so there were a lot of firsts and clearly this became a huge deal the newsfeed is essentially what people think of when they think of Facebook now but it was super controversial when it came out people were very against this they did not want to be sharing this much information with people or so they thought and then they realized eventuall

y oh this is actually exactly what I want what did you learn from going through that experience of building something that people initially reject and then later realize that they actually do want this and this is exactly what they're waiting for this is a story that you tell a lot actually in through your interviews which is just like you have to have conviction in what you're building you're choosing your customers as much as your customers are choosing you is is one way I think about it somet

imes and know one mistake that you do see sometimes startups make is they get an early cohort of users whose needs actually take them kind of orthogonal to a larger market and so they become kind of held hostage by their earliest customers now uh so we've T time and time again we've had a vision for what we thought this should look like and it wasn't the thing we were delivering right now and so people who are using the thing we currently had we're not sure that that change was what they wanted

but we had a confidence that over time they would and and we don't we're not always right but in these cases we were right now Newsfeed was an easier case than people uh suspect because everyone was outraged at the same time as they immediately doubled their usage of the product so so we had a few advantages there which was it was literally like everyone was like I hate this so much and they would refresh refresh refresh and so we like okay wait this is a there's cognitive dissonance here uh bet

ween what the stated preferences and what the revealed preferences are in the economic sense so Newsfeed was a little easier than people suspect to to stick with but people sometimes misunderstand that they think oh the lesson is don't listen to your customers not about and we certainly care tremendous about and even with Newsfeed we did actually screw some things up I kind of always make this joke that uh it's almost like you know you're going at the party and music's loud you're talking to som

ebody and the music cuts out right when you're saying something at a super high volume and so everyone in the party hears the last thing you said now you were saying in a public place so it wasn't like it was a private comment but you also didn't mean to broadcast it at that volume we kind of did that to the entire user base because we took what had been wall posts which sure anybody could have gone to that profile and scene and then put it kind of on blast like on Main you know as the kids say

these days put it on Maine and someone's like ah you know so we did that we I do think we like I don't want to say like we we did screw things up like it wasn't like oh this is a clause execution so another thing to know is like when did you screw something small up and when did you screw something big up like when is the thing itself wrong versus when were the details wrong that is an art that is a real art and you don't always have user data to determine it uh like we did and so a lot of that

is do you have a clear vision and intuition for what you expected to happen and then what happened instead and can you diagnose that Delta there so in the newsfeed case we made a bunch of little mistakes the thing itself was right and I'm I I I really am quite proud of of the work we did there uh you know me and Chris Cox at the most core probably the engineering side Richie s the on the as the PM like there was no ranked feeds before that we did have some AI that I built before for the anti-spa

m anti uh things but it was pretty rudimentary so was it was probably the first consumer AI that that was in a website of that kind Rod content and we built like the most efficient monetizing surface in history uh outside of search I think and for those who were curious I don't use monetization because I think money is the most important thing I do think it suggests the economic power you've created which I do think correlates very strongly with human utility although you know obviously I respec

t that some people may disagree yeah in terms of the economic utility the vend diagram of boss of news feed and ads uh create a trillion dollars of value uh so well done it's not nothing not nothing proud of that we're proud of that work you have you have this quote in one of your post about the newsfeed where he said it consumed me more fully than anything in life had ever consumed me it opened up to me the truth that when you're passionate about something you do better work you do smarter work

and you're in order of magnitude more productive there's no substitute for it one thing I've learned about myself since that post actually is just the degree to which I am somebody who is inclined to be passionate about things that's a that's it's a gift uh that I'm very lucky to have and I understand that's not every person and so like actually the ad thing is a good example when Mark told me to go work on ads I was like no I don't want I don't think I have a passion for that I had this idea o

f myself a very strong identity of myself as this like AI infrastructure product guy and I was like working in this space and uh nope I was wrong I just like I'm a guy who gets excited about things once I got into ads oh this is fascinating this a it's a three-sided Marketplace and there's all these different it was like a real you know felt like I was playing chess times in terms of of the moves with the other players in the industry and I was like super punched about that and then when I he wa

nted to work on Hardware I was like no I'm not I'm a software guy I'm a software guy Mark and I no I love this work I just like I that's such a fascinating space that I mean I've learned so much so I do think that's right I do think when I find something I'm passionate about that's good what I have learned since then is to give myself the space to understand if I can get passionate about it now there are parts of jobs that I've had before where I just never found the passion and after six months

I just have to move on I literally it's like I'll either quit get fired like I'm doing bad work I don't care about the work you know uh and so I do have a self-awareness it's something I can get passionate about anything but I do have a pretty broad pallet it turns out I think that's a really interesting career lesson of don't assume you won't be excited about something that may come up is there anything there that You' share with folks of just like explore it give it six months see if you can

can get excited about it absolutely so I have a very unusual career Arc in some ways which is like I really almost changed jobs like every six months for a long time like you know I was working on this uh Integrity stuff Newsfeed in the background then I was working on Newsfeed for about a year uh then I worked on integ uh sight speed and infrastructure and like detecting savs and issues and then I worked on boot camp and then I worked on messaging and groups and it's like I just you know I had

this really funny thing I always kind of joke it was like uh for those who are old enough to remember Karate Kid I felt like I was you know painting a lot of fences waxing a lot of cars and at the end I knew karate you know like at the end at the end I had the payoff because I'd gone through and I'd met a lot of people I'd worked in these different areas and I understood different Dynamics um well other people who joined in my cohort were getting promoted on but they were like in a single track

like they just stayed in one place and they got promoted whereas I kept moving around and probably at some point early in my career felt like I was moving more slowly relative to my peers and then when I finally turned the corner really with the ads appointment which I did for five years I went vertical I just like my career went vertical I was kind of since then I've kind of been on that trajectory and so advice I most often give people that this for me at least the lesson that I take from this

is just like I just was willing to learn aggressively I would move because I wasn't learning enough I was bored and so I wasn't like learning enough new stuff and what was cool about finally getting into the ads job and likewise in the job I'm in now is like those jobs I learned a ton for five years I never stopped learning in those jobs you will occasionally find those jobs where they're super deep and you can just keep learning meanwhile a lot of my friends whose careers were on a better tror

me then earlier they literally got bored of what they were doing but they didn't like have any place to jump to like there there wasn't like some other they were they' become domain specialists in a domain that they'd kind of exhausted for themselves and maybe they even stuck around longer than they wanted to because it was comfortable or because the company wanted them to and it ended up kind of being a hindrance to them in the middle of their career and so for me it's like uh don't be jump in

to new things give it six months if it's not the thing no problem like you just built a ton of new skills that's going to come in handy I promise you that keep going and and likewise uh when you do make that jump that's early career optimize for learning optimize for like think about a compound interest like it's it's like the first like 10 years of compound interest don't look that impressive it's like after 10 years it starts to look good I love that advice it's it's similar advice I always gi

ve a variety of experience often ends up being the most valuable thing you build over time just trying a d bunch of stuff doing some internal tools maybe working on customer support I don't know trust and safety user facing products infrastructure I'm thinking from a PM's perspective maybe an engineers and other functions one question along the line so we talked about the I have Sauron and working on like the most important thing at the company do you have any advice on how much of your career y

ou should be working in that Center yeah listen all that's being equal I think there's two really good places to be I think one is carrying a lot of water in areas that the company's not paying attention to but you know are important M and it needs to be a lot like you really got to you got to own that stuff and like really move mountains over there because I I promise you as an executive when there's a huge Dam holding up you know the flood waters you respect the heck out of the person who is h

olding that Dam up like you're like you know you keep doing that Atlas like that is good work over there the second B fight to be or maybe this equally B is like on the most important thing and on the most important thing that's where you get like to the advice that Eric schmi gave sh SRE which is like hey it's a rocket ship get on like don't ask what seat I'm in like just get on if it's the most important thing you're going to get a smaller piece everyone wants to be there get the piece if you

but it's the most important thing get the piece that you can Crush kill do a great job at and grow from because you're gonna get a ton of visibility you're gonna get a ton of experience you're to see what it looks like in the fire like in the fire and that is invaluable uh you will use that everywhere and that so I say that that's at project selection time but now I to be cautious understand projects that start in the fire hopefully are forged into some manner of metal that cools and is no no lo

nger in the fire like God willing and likewise uh things like dams that are holding up flood waters have a tendency to crack or break or floods overcome the like so I think you you do want to be at selection time in one of those two places but then you also G you're GNA stick with a ride and again to my point like if you're not engaged if you aren't doing great work if you don't love it then move on if you've exhausted it you used to love it but you don't anymore move on if you still love it and

you're engaged great that's cool like it's we that's a great thing you you deserve to go from the forge to the dam and back over time like that you don't have to always just keep jumping onto the latest fire I tried to do that once after the ad actually so I spent six months and we built the first mobile ad product in 2012 and kind of uh saved uh the the IPO which had gotten pretty Grim at that point and I told Mark I was like this is so fun maybe you can just keep doing this we just putting me

on the biggest fire every six months and he turns to me said bz that's not a real job he's like I need you to stay here and Usher this forward which I did for the next four and a half years and it was amazing it was amazing and again I do give him such it's funny I'm gonna get a hard time with this uh I'm one of the I'm one of Mark's biggest critics as well as being one of his biggest fans I'm both those I have both those jobs but today we're talking about stuff that I think Mark really demonst

rates really well and uh he he did a great job of of pushing me in my career to different places where I didn't think I could succeed and he saw the opportunity and made it happen what have you learned about uh giving Mark like negative criticism anything that he accepts what what do you learned about that Mark's voracious for all information and all points of view one of the things that's pretty interesting I talked earlier about how much as a Founder I think especially uh you have to have trem

endous conviction you just have to you have to have tremendous degree of of confidence and I think Mark is somebody who is like uh maybe the strongest willpower of a person I've ever met just in a pure willpower sense and so one interesting about Mark is you'll give him feedback he listens he's not he's a he's a very it's a kind person to work for so you'll give him feedback and he'll listen truly he'll most often tell you that you're wrong why you're wrong that's just like most often and what w

ill happen is it's uncanny it's like over the course of the next like week or two you'll just see shifts and I don't think he's like doing it sub it's you know I I've always kind of jokes like the information gets to him so much information every day it gets to him and then like at night he like recompiles the whole world with all that information and comes back and and and by the way this is not just true about product work in my head I was thinking about product stuff where you're like hey I t

hink this product is doing this wrong he's like no no that's why it's not that way and the product will sship also if you give him feedback just on his own presence in a meeting or delivery he'll be like oh well here's why I did it that way and then like a couple weeks later you'll be in a similar situation and you'll he will moderate like how he shows up so I actually find him somebody is really it's really satisfying to give him feedback it really works it's very effective but you do have to l

ike Take the Long View on it uh like and and he will have a he will have the things he did he didn't do on accident he will have a reason why he did them the way he did them it's a great example of strong opinions loosely held yeah that's right it also makes me think I think use the compiler analogy I'm thinking like the model training like the re he's retraining his model overnight yeah it's funny one one of the things that's so funny about Mark is he uh if you give him some feedback in the mor

ning the next like six meetings he has whether it's about that product or not he will ask people what they think of that feedback he won't attribute he's just like hey what do you think about this in this product and so you'll be in a meeting with him and you'll see him doing it he'll come to the meeting with you about some other topic you're like hey boss what do you think about this product in this this idea and so he will like over the course of the day take that little note and kind of press

ure test it because and he loves to triangulate what is where are all the points of view on this that maybe didn't see uh so it really values a broad perspective on each thing that's being discussed which is pretty fun trying to get more training data for his for his model I get it I'm not here you can't get me to call Mark in LM that's not fair that's we could all hope to be as smart as Mark as you were talking I noticed your tattoos and it reminded me that you've got at least two tattoos that

I'm aware of yeah one is of California which I completely understand California is a very special place we have this other tattoo that is just the words veritos can you talk about what that about and why that's important to you the funny thing about the tattoos in general is I came out of high school as like I don't know I don't know what my I don't know if there was an archetype for me but I didn't drink till I was 21 I was a very rule following person I was like why are you gonna get a tattoo

you know like affect your body like people D why you dye your hair like just like let it be what it was and some of this was like I think I had was a somebody who was privileged and had a great deal of self-confidence in who I was and what I wanted to be and was fine but some was also like weirdly judgy about other people in a way that's kind of offbrand for me certainly today but at the time getting a tattoo was a big deal for me because I was like oh like this is just like the vehicle for my l

ife and like you can do whatever you want with it and it doesn't have it's not like a you know it's it's something that you possess and you can if you if you feel like if you want to decorate it you can decorate it and so getting a tattoo was a big deal to me actually and I kind of completely shifted my mindset of uh how I thought about my body and how I thought about people's body and the presence in the in the time maybe to some degree even like an understanding of mortality like hey this is l

ike can't take it with you like it's all it's all gonna go you know when you're 18 you think you're gonna live forever and when you're by the time you're 22 a grizzled 22y old veteran you're like ah tattoo that bad boy up it's all going down and so yeah that's so I got the very to tattoo which is uh Latin for truth which is a you know I will say it's a little cheesy because it's also Harvard's motto um and but I got it in a monotype font you know this the programmers font here the other thing is

interesting to me about tattoos was it's also part of a generational shift uh you know we grew up in a time when tattoos were really seen by adults as U you know gangs or bikers or or Sailors or like you know certain types now my understanding I saw a stat recently that more people in my generation have tattoos than don't have tattoos uh and so I think I think we also just culturally shifted positions in a way that I find I find richness of self-expression wonderful I really think it's great an

d so I'm I'm I'm here for all of it my assumption from what you're describing is this idea of Truth is very important to the way you think and work my reputation does proceed me on this point I'm afraid which is you know uh I think when I was young I saw being honest and I was wrong by the way I saw being honest as like kind of a get out of jail free card like you could say whatever you wanted as long as you're being honest um that's just not the case at all uh I've read about this before but by

far my biggest professional regrets were me not being kind and I used to think like I I wrote this note a while back called be kind where being nice that's like patronizing or or telling somebody things that are half-truths or just like getting by and I'm against that but being kind isn't that being kind is like hey how can I deliver this feedback in a way that is actually productive and helpful in a way that is going to help them and not cause them just to feel bad and helpless and I think I w

as do I did that wrong a lot as as a young man and so being honest is still a big part of my personality no one would ever accuse me of being dishonest um who knows me and I think people understand and respect that I'm pretty direct and if I have concerns or issues I'm going to bring them up I'm just much better at bringing them up now and expressing a true care and belief like I wouldn't bring it up if I didn't think we could do better if I didn't think we could fix it if I didn't believe in in

the situation and uh so uh being honest is still a huge part of my identity and I think that's something I'm very proud of but I will say the contextual ization of like how I'm honest has changed immensely since I got this tattoo that seems reasonable this touches a little bit on something I definitely wanted to talk about which is one of your most classic pieces and this is the way I first learned about you is a piece that is called communication is the job yeah I know many people have read th

is many people haven't I'd love for you to just talk about what this means and why this is important why this something that you wanted to share yeah it's uh it's one of the things that especially if you aspire to be a leader and and Leadership isn't management and Leadership isn't uh uh being resp the only person responsible it's not always the same as accountability but if you want to have an impact on the world around you it is exclusively done through the the the creation of artifacts or or

uh verbalizations that like affect other humans like that's the only that is all there is that's all there is if you want to have an impact if you want to like create some kind of a a lasting change and it could be in your low in your little relationship it could be in your team it could be in your company it could be in the world uh it is down to communication and so often you hear people saying like oh like yeah that was like I had that I wrote that up a year ago it's like yeah but you did a b

ad job of writing a year ago or we would have not wasted a year not doing it like it's like you know it's like the you know people always think it's oh I had that idea and that's like means anything it means nothing it means absolutely nothing or it's like oh like I wrote this post like well you didn't break through with it so that's like that's on you it's not on the audience people want to blame the audience well the audience is just there and so uh I mentioned this even earlier and I hope peo

ple caught it when uh when I said hey if uh somebody's I give somebody a piece of work and they come back six months later and they have done the wrong thing I'll take the L I will take the L on it it's not great for them they'll be pissed they wasted their time but like I said that that's my responsibility I did not communicate clearly what I wanted what the expectations were could they have also helped themselves sure they could have and that's a thing that they you know takes all sides we sho

uld we should work on this problem from both angles have another post called listening is the job which is the other side of this but like communication is job is I I really believe it actually is a relationship to the to this idea that came out of the US Marines and the seals uh of extreme ownership which is like so whenever something goes wrong it's like I asked myself what could I have done differently uh in terms of how I communicated things for this to have gone better could I have set prio

rities better could I have set expectations better did I need to have a better metric that I pointed the team at did I put the wrong people on by the way the thing I talk about is org org charts are communication devices they don't exist there's not a physical string between you and your manager they're just communication tools that are supposed to give people a rough sense of how things are organized and where to go with who and so I all these things are communication silence is communication m

e not reaching out to you check on you to check on your project right we talked about this the if of sarin earlier what does that mean that means trust that means responsibility like the absence of check-ins has meaning you cannot not communicate you are always communicating something with your face with your clothes with your body what are you communicating I'll give you a funny example uh which I hope we get to put in the podcast because if you're watching this on video you will have noticed t

hat my camera cannot stop adjusting light it's just constantly too dark or too bright I'm trying a new camera I'm a nerdy guy I tried a lot of camera gear I tried a lot of microphone gear I'm like I I love to have all the latest gadgets and Gizmo so I'm trying something new it's not working and in my head I'm like what is this communicating about me people are gonna think that I don't care or that I'm not competent so just a little little that's what I'm talking about and now I felt compelled to

explain it in the podcast so I can communicate clearly that that's not the case so I I really just think uh so much of what I try to do in my professional life is understand the mental model of other people where are they right now and I mean specific people like my managers or my key technical leaders uh and I mean General people like teams and I mean broadly like just the average human where are they at in this conversation and how can I craft my language my presence my Persona everything to

Usher them from where they are to where I want to to get them and that requires me to have a very clear idea of where I want to get them have to have a clear idea of where they are and I want to tell you it's not as much work as it sounds like this isn't like I think no one would accuse me of having this big fabricated persona it's not that but it is like having tremendous empathy for where people are starting and I think and that that was the leap for me all the rest of it all the rest of how I

show up in meetings and trying to smile more because I'm like a big scary guy like those things are little things that you work on those are and they become second nature and they're easy the hard thing is just having the empathy for your audience and being like where are they where are they starting and when you miss taking responsibility for that extreme responsibility for that there's so much good advice in that there's so many threads I want to follow but let's just follow this last one of

trying to understand how someone is best communicated to is there an example to make that a little more real for people of just what you've done to like oh here's I'm going to communicate with this person I'll give you a couple so one is like multimodality um there's an old saying right uh repetition never spoiled the prayer and I think most experienced communicators uh whether they be writers whether they be public speakers talk about the importance of reiterating a point several times and in s

everal different ways to make sure that people have a chance to internalize it you want to use it you want to say it directly you want to use metaphor and so for me it's like I will give an all hands and then write a post with the content of the All Hands because different people are going to respond differently to these modalities and are going to absorb information at different rates on these different modalities that's a trivial one another one that I think of all the time is is uh making sur

e that you address people's fears and concerns people will not listen to you if they think you don't know what's going on uh and so one of my favorite things to do when we're talking about some kind of issue is right up top and say hey let me be clear this is the issue we're having I know we're having it I know it matters and then I'll say the same thing that I would have said but they would have literally ignored me because they're like how can they Trust my conclusions if they don't accept the

premise you know what I'm saying so I think there's a there's a whole piece there obviously when you're in person it's a lot easier because you're reading facial expressions even on this right I'm reading you nodding on that like okay he's he's got he's he's with me and then I throw in you know what I mean whereas if you were kind of like give me a cocked head I then bring a second example to try to like Drive the point home but you build yourself up most people are going to realistically start

in their careers trying to influence one or two people that's where you start one or two people that's who you got to communicate with your manager one teammate that's who you got and then you build up and build up and build up a skill set to do it at larger and larger scale I love so much of this advice I think it's also helpful for relationships here's what you're upset about totally here's what I think we can do being a get the work that I've had so graciously supported to do on myself at me

ta uh with great mentors Cheryl Samberg Mark Zuckerberg a bunch of others and coaches absolutely made me a better partner and husband and my wife and then by the way vice versa having kids and getting deep in the literature around raising children congratulations to you by the way uh getting deep in that literature made me a better manager uh absolutely made me a better manager in terms of thinking about how people are managing their emotions and how to engage with them in those times amazing we

need a second addition of this boss's parenting advice that's right and relationship it's like it's all the good stuff it's you know no bad kids uh uh landsbury it's it's a good inside Dr Becky like it's all it's all I really I really think that the modern parenting Cannon is really rich amazing so much good content this episode is brought to you by explow a game changer for customer facing analytics and data reporting are your users craving more dashboards reports and analytics within your pro

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n Pro and VR headsets have you tried the Vision Pro thoughts actually Mark and I tried it together and uh I want to say first of all when the when the headset came out we breathed a little side of relief because the stuff inside of it didn't represent a fundamental breakthrough so there wasn't uh everything inside of it wasn't that we probably could have gone and done with the exception of Apple silicon which is a you know is a a Marvel but it's worth KN Apple silicon is like a 2X Marvel when do

ing things like scaling display resolution is unfortunately a quadratic proposition and so a 2X linear scaling Advantage doesn't buy you as much as you might expect when you're trying to scale resolution and so uh that was step one and then but we still assumed at that price point you know with their legendary attention to detail and polish they probably you know produce a great product and uh the line that I said actually on my own podcast with Matthew ball a week ago was like look I was prepar

ed to come to the market and say we have the best value headset like if you want outstanding best possible headset for the money we've got it it's the Quest three and I was so thrilled when I tried the AP next to to Mark we were like no no no we actually we think we have the actual best headset now we're not say it's the best at all things if you're sitting still and watching a movie in high resol res movie yep app Vision Pros is is really great uh it's really great that that that the resolution

shines uh the way they've tuned the pass through uh shines if you're stationary and looking straight ahead and and they've done some really nice things with the UI um I'm a little bit it's one of these things that we do get annoyed about a mile the side we get a little bit annoyed about as product people and that this happens to all of us happens to Apple happens to Google happens to us we have a bunch of internal things we've been playing with which will at some point ship and we will be accus

ed of having stolen them when we actually you did not steal uh if if you want you can go see my Kora answer on the history of the like button where this happened previously where we had built the like button internally before it was launched elsewhere H anyways so whole thing so this this happens in in our industry a lot and I really shouldn't care as much it's a little bit of my ego peeking through which I should control and Tamp down if I'm being responsible but yeah so so so the beautiful UI

polishes they did a tremendous job with uh eye tracking one of the things that's interesting about the eye tracking is to do it the way they've done it that's why you have to have the prescription inserts so it doesn't support your your glasses you have to get prescription inserts they're kind of expensive and they can shoot the cameras that track your eyes through the lens as well as the the light around it ours go from the side on on the quest Pro and that allows you to wear corrective lenses

and so different choices like that have trade-offs but it's still cool it's great that they got that in there at the same time our hand tracking is better obviously the app Library we knew was going to be better that's not totally fair uh to that they just they've just launched and they have small volume still but um but uh I just find the Comfort the thing that really got me the most the field of view is really small on the Apple Vision Pro and some people are characterizing it incorrectly on t

he internet they're doing a characterization up close to the lens once you factor in the eye relief the distance between where the lenses are and where your eyeball is their field The View gets pretty narrow for almost all faces relative to ours which I find distracting their view their their displays are much dimmer than ours and I find the motion blur really distracting when I'm in mixed reality use cases and as I mentioned earlier in the P I'm a huge mixed reality buff like I'm a huge fan of

that potential for exactly the same reason that they are by the way which I think hands and mixed reality make it feel much more accessible to more people I'm pretty glad we have the controller in our set though because it really expands what you can do and you know we don't just like operate our computers with just like one thing with keyboard and we have a mouse like we do multiple modalities all the time so I really feel like the Comfort the the the lack of persistence and motion blur and our

pass through the brightness of our displays I was like oh man like if you had if you gave me one to take I would take Quest three now people have rightly said that's pretty biased decision of course it is go get your own opinion but what kills me is most people haven't done that they have not tried the quest three that's what kills me the most if you go and try Quest three ask yourself if You' rather have seven of those one for you and six of your best friends or one apple Vision Pro I'm sure t

he answer isn't Quest three for every person there are people for whom there are use cases that really fit their life with Al Vision Pro I'm cool with that but people don't even know that the quest three you can do remote desktop you know you can do it both through an app called remote desktop which is very popular or you can go into into work rooms and you can have three monitors surrounding you um you know streamed from your machine it's like so we like I think some of this is just like people

have not even done the work they haven't even they haven't even tried it so I welcome all of you who think I am biased to prove one way or the other what you think but don't do it without putting the quest three on and giv it through its Paces because it's a pretty great device and uh you can do a lot with $3,000 extra dollars how did they get away with that by the way three we we launched a headset that was like 12299 and people lost their minds about it and they're like ah 3500 it's fine this

is fine no no one cares I don't know it say you know but fairness is too much to ask and I don't care about that Apple has earned earned the great brand they've built they truly have I think it's tremendous and and I I certainly celebrate a large number of Apple product I'm a huge fan of their work I'm a huge fan of with a dup that's probably why I expected more from the AP well I'll show you my favorite AR device which is these rayb bands I actually bought yeah we uh here I'll put them on here

I'm gonna what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna record I didn't tell you I was goingon to do this I'm gonna record this as we're talking look at this I like that they look so they look so good on you too this is a good fit my mother-in-law like you look so sophisticated you looked really smart with these on uh and we bought these actually to watch to film our kids to like or our kid to like instead of having a camera in his face and it's been awesome it's really the best it is so hard to look at a pho

ne screen and have the real thing be like in between you like it's like no it's the glass is the way to do it look at this my new look have glasses on all time we got to get you the multimodal I gotta I've been playing that since December where you can use the camera to ask uh our meta AI assistant about things it's really good I was in a I was in uh a ski Village recently with my family and I had them on I just like hey you know take a look to what you see and it like I had found a sign and it

gave me directions like hey the bathrooms are down those stairs to the right like if you want food it's over to the right I it did it couldn't tell what village I was in but it was like you're in a ski Village somewhere like here's the amenities and I was like wow you know it's we're there's some there's something real magical here I feel like I need this for my podcasting interviews so I could just have little voice tell me like questions to be asked and where I'm at right totally that be I'm I

'm gonna cheat on this one and uh and say we got uh we have obviously we've been talking for a while about playing with glasses that have uh full AR capabilities and we've got one that is rumored to be coming internally soon so heavily rumored in fact uh that you might even say it's it's almost been confirmed and uh what's been what's been really fun is is being able to play with these really time machines really in terms of what they are that it's amazing amazing technology and yeah people were

uh giving a speeches like big companywide speeches and had all their notes on the glasses and they could control this the slides uh just using a a gesture oh so there's there's there's there's exciting things a foot it's the feature is looking pretty bright something that I wanted to touch on which is when Mark put out this whole video of here's what I think of Apple Vision Pro versus the quest A lot of people are just like oh man because he's putting out this video he must be so afraid of what

's happening and it's like it's not the right move what went into the thinking was there like strategic thinking there was it just him like here's what I think you know this kind does murder me about the modern era everyone's in there met ahead about everything everything's like a four-dimensional chess that was just what Mark thought of the thing that's what he thought about it you know I think he wanted to make sure people remembered hey Quest three is a literally a better device and it's you

haven't even people haven't even tried it and so there you know we're not always playing four-dimensional chess over here sometimes we're just like here's a thing that I believe is true I'm going to say it out out loud with my mouth like that's what we did that's not that hard like and I think I guess people you know when I do it everyone expects it because of my Persona or brand what is I guess people are surprised when the CEO does it all right I get that that's cool there's like other sets of

societal expectations there uh and like we we're all familiar with like you know Apple putting the welcome IBM ad in uh the New York Times and then slack doing the same thing with Microsoft and like the balber iPhone comments none of those were true discussions of the technical merits of a product right those were all just like big you know rally the troops like gestures this is not that like we have we're like Mark is deep he's an expert in this stuff I'm an expert in this stuff like I feel gr

eat about our choices I by the way when I use it I could get myself completely into the head of the person who designed it and what I I I can tell you from using it what instructions they were given uh that team was given I can tell you what they were optimizing for I can tell you what constraints they were under by all the choices they made I can tell you all those things and I understand it coheres in that way we made different choices it shouldn't surprise anyone we like our choices better li

ke we could have made those choices we didn't make those choices we made these other choices and so for me like the weight the wire which just always brushes against my ear like the the pocketable thing like I get it it's not what I would have done and didn't know that because I had the chance to do it and I chose not to so it's like I don't know I don't know why people are surprised but uh but yeah so I think I think this was n like this wasn't some big Savvy strategic move this was just like M

ark's like got a chance to use it he's like oh man like I think we should tell people what the real story is here and we did I love that insight and I know a lot of people watching are like oh he's right wow I didn't think of it that way and so I think it had a lot of that impact I want to zo out a little bit and talk about meta's Journey over the past couple years it feels like there was a a huge downturn in public perception of meta and the stock price and then over the past couple years there

's been a huge turnaround and it feels like there's always a lot to learn from these periods so just as an example of the stock price I was just looking at it it was down to 80ish and now today it's $487 yeah I'm curious just what you've learned from going through that downturn and turn around and I know it's still in progress but just what what have you learned from that Journey yeah well there's a lot to take away I got to tell you we I think we had the single largest the largest single day st

ock drop in history followed 18 months later by the largest single day gain in stock market history oh my God as the legendary Lou Holtz uh said you know you're never as good as they say you are when you're winning and they're never as bad as they say you are when you're losing Mark has has always um always brought that quote out to guide us internally to try to insulate ourselves a little bit from the vagaries of external opinion and that's not just true with stock prices that's true with media

and press it's it's it's true across a lot of things one of the things I told told my team and I I still have to repeat it to them it's like one it's hard to remember when you're in it is that you know more than the critics do you know more than the analysts in the marketplace do you know more than the media does you know more than the podcasters do you know more than the Twitter does you know more about what's real and substantial of value about our company than they do that doesn't mean ignor

e them because they have a different perspective and you need to understand it and it may contain even if the totality is less than what you know it may contain parts that you do not know so I'm a huge fan I read the criticism of everything and I read it very carefully looking out for confirmation bias looking out for things that uh I might be inclined to resist but are maybe true I invite all critique but I also don't accept the critique blindly I don't just say yes this is obviously true um th

ere's a great uh Gil Manning Amnesia is a great concept for everyone to understand Gil Manning Amnesia is this property where if you you'll read a newspaper article let's say newspaper why not about a thing about which you are an expert so uh and you'll be baffled because here is an article that is not just wrong it's like it's inverted causality it's a what's Michael kryon I'll steal Michael kon's quote on this it's a wet sidewalks make rain story and you'll be like what a terrible Bizarro stor

y and then you will turn the p page of the newspaper and it'll be another article about a topic about which you know nothing and you will read it as if it is the gospel truth you'll tell your oh no look at this information about you know this foreign situation look it's perfectly true we should be smarter than that and so does that mean you don't read the thing no you read it you just read everything with that perspective of like wait a second like this is another point of view and how do I inte

grate that into a whole perspective that I can have and be informed about so uh that's the the first the macro thing is is taking the Long View realizing that when you're in the dumps it's not as bad as you think when you're at the top it's not as bad it's not as good as you think it's like somewhere in between at all times the second thing is communication is the job we really did not communicate effectively I think with the market uh around our future Investments and listen we've had two 10yea

r long huge investment areas one has been AI one has been labs and AI is looking pretty good today you think we can all agree you know with uh with llama 2 with Fair the breakthroughs that we've had with the second people don't know this that fair ra AI research lab is uh our the second most cited research lab in AI behind Google so we've been we've been doing this work we didn't come here casually like we've been doing it and so that's looking pretty good I don't think we did enough to explain

those bets to people previously The Core Business was going strong enough that they kind of were willing to ignore them uh and what's the old Warren Buffett quote it's only when the tide goes out we see who's not wearing swimming trunks um and so it's like when the tide went out when you have the Ukraine war and an interest rate hike and recession spent in recessions now everyone's scrambling for that incremental dollar and they're like go get rid of this stuff and we had to tell the company you

don't want to work at a company that when times are tough kills all future growth and just like Shores up in the core business that's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point a little later than expected but like dying at some point you want to work at a company that has a balanced portfolio of Investments which we had we didn't explain that well and so we spent that time explaining that to the market to the press to everybody and now it's you know now it's I think as peop

le understand the size of it the scope of it and of course it helps that the core business is is kind of overcome its challenges there from at and other kinds of stuff it's looking pretty good so yeah I think uh I I do think one part is as an internal person really moderating your your attachment to the external narratives and swings that's super important and you do that based on like understand your own expertise and the second part is understanding why is there a Delta like what is there and

and and grab that it's usually communication there's also a big flattening of the org this was something a lot of people talked about where managers became ic's is there anything more there that you've learned of just how to adjust the org to be more efficient yeah of course I and I should have included that in the first section I was I was a bit eager to wrap it up elegantly in the two but you're right appreci we did make we made significant shifts in how we operated the business which is super

painful and uh listen this goes back uh I you know this goes back to the boom times of covid when it looked like there was a a real lasting secular shift in things like e-commerce and in working remotely and these tool sits where which are exactly what we build and it's primed us and we built up a huge work Workforce to pursue those opportunities we still believe in those opportunities but they're little they're back on their original timeline and actually literally if you look at a bunch of gr

aphs that we have internally it literally the covid boom and then uh kind of as it not bust really as it receded everything's back on its original trajectory so we didn't like lose ground or lose time but the pull forward didn't happen well that means much your economics don't make any sense anymore now you made a bunch of Investments that are going to yield to distant in the future and getting there faster isn't going to help you and you're carrying much extra cost that sucks man it sucks and w

e don't feel great about it uh we really don't and uh it's a business it's awful and it happens I do think one thing that was interesting about that time was for those of us who I you know grew up and set doom boom firsthand I was born and raised in the valley so that was like you know all around me when I was graduating high school going to college and then in the 2008 major recession on the housing crash and on the market and all that stuff now let's imagine you graduated college in 2009 and g

ot a job well shoot your 15 years in your career you could be a director and you've never seen a downturn so I think we also had in addition to you know what is very unfortunately conventional Mis forecasting in the business that caused us to overhire that we had to correct for you also had a Workforce that was just not at all all of a mentality that this could ever happen like this like this felt like it was a a you know a r of God when in fact it's like a cyclical nature of all businesses that

this will happen at some time and you hope it doesn't and you wish it didn't but you have to deal with it and so I think we bit of a tough storm there for the whole industry and we're still feeling it I think uh you know still feeling it certainly we're happy at meta to be beyond that point and we're uh growing again and executing at a stable rate and feeling really good about that but quite a few of our other companies in the industry aren't and it's a very uncertain time for for engineers for

PMS for designers for everyone and all the support functions around them so um I'm super sympathetic for that I think what you obviously the the Mis forecasting that happened inside of meadow walls happen everywhere and and now that you have especially with with higher interest rates and cash isn't as cheap runways are tighter like people are just making those pragmatic calls uh I think we'll rally back from this I think this is a normal thing that happens to Industry but it doesn't reduce my s

ympathy and empathy for those who have been affected by it or who who live in fear of it yeah I was talking to a friend who works at meta and I was asking them what it's like to work at meta and she was just like it's intense and it used to be more chill there were people that were coasting here and there and now she's like no all those people are gone now it's just only the intense people left and things are we're working really hard does that bring up anything yeah I don't want to comment on p

eople who left people left meta for all kinds of different reasons or and and and likewise you know role elimination happened in many cases because we just decided not to do this work at this point we're going to do it two years from now and don't need to carry a team to do it so I think it's really hard to generalize because each of these is a specific person with a specific life uh and a story that is Rich and deserves to be told but I do think that uh yeah if there was somebody coasting and y

ou as a manager have to make tough calls on who you're bringing in uh like you know which way you're going to bias my my profound suspicion and again I don't know your friend who you spoke with my profound suspicion is that person was probably already working hard you know what I'm saying like like that person was already probably working hard like I don't think we like changed how hard any individual worked I really don't believe that I do think there was a selection bias as to like like what w

as going to happen and I think that's probably what you saw play in the fact if there was if there is a generality that could be found maybe as a last question I have this segment where I call failure corner where I asked people to share a failure of their career and what they learned from that experience is there is there something that comes to mind I've failed tons of times I've built products that nobody used uh I've built uh technical architectures that didn't scale I fail all kinds of time

s uh I don't regret most of those uh almost every one of those I learned from you know it was a a stop on the path to a better solution or it was a recognition that this thing wasn't going to work ever which is you know it's own kind of a gift all the failures that I regret that I take seriously are personal failures where I affected a person in a way that I'm not proud of maybe wasn't proud of the time because I wasn't in control of my own emotions or mood I was feeling fearful I was feeling sc

ared and there's a bunch of these one or two that stand out that I don't feel comfortable sharing because the person affected I think would be would prefer I didn't share I'll share one that that was uh you know I think the person's an our tight now we have this really silly discussion I remember so vividly uh in the early days of client server architectures uh which Facebook obviously is a website so you're calling to a server to get the web page but then that server is going to call to other s

ervers to gather things and I was one of the major kind of clients of remote procedure calls uh because Newsfeed ranking was all done on this other set of servers that had its own special requirements and special build and how it was put together and so you know your main web server would put a call out over procedure call to the remote server and and get a response back and uh we had we had this really janky RPC system that uh I won't say who built it but it was built and it was such a piece of

garbage constantly failing not robust at all and one of our best Engineers Mark slee built a new one called Thrift was a great really great RPC uh infrastructure and uh one of my one of my best friends Dave Federman one of my really good friends and a brilliant engineer we were talking about how to do the encoding and I was like I want it to be binary encoding I was like binary encoding I want it to be super efficient on The Wire because I'm storing these rpcs they do two jobs for us one of whi

ch is the the active RPC but I also stored the rpcs in a log and replayed them to do the work that we were doing in news feed ranking that's how it was done back in the day it was all kind of asynchronous offline and so I wanted to be as tight as possible because my my memory bandwidth was very limited and remember was so expensive back then and dayve feder was like no no no like that's you know that's term thinking BOS like we should be using Linux style descriptors that are plain English langu

age then you can look at the log you can see what it is it's parsable like memory bandwidth will get cheaper but like these logs being scrutable to development is going to be a better thing this is a totally this is nerd bait those who those who those of you who've been engineers in this call this is like Vim emac this is nerd bait this goes deep this is like a long old keep it coming I I think I like it's the room full of Engineers at the company and the company's not that big and so like proba

bly half the engineers at the company in this room and I just like absolutely I was like yelling at D like I'm like I'm literally like I'm turning red I'm like sweating I'm so angry at Dave Federman for like for countermanding my proposal when I'm the major RPC customer a couple things this is so and so dumb Marley just built two encoders it's not that hard you just build you pick which encoder you want for your things that's the easiest solution ever uh second thing is Dave was right by the way

like within a year the memory M definitely didn't matter relative to like how inscrutable it was to like try to get into these logs I had to build a t of extra custom software to like Lo parse the logs and like understand what's going on uh but also it just like it was just a it was a case where my identity was caught up in being right like my identity and for those who don't know identity threat is just the biggest your the most your worst behavior is always going to come out when you think yo

u are under identity threat when you feel like some core part of how you see yourself is in question you will react with every ounce of your fiber to defend that conception of yourself because it's so expensive to reconceptualize who you are that you like defend yourself so like my identity was being right I got a very toss on the wrist and it it caus me take like one of my best friends one of the best Engineers I knew a guy I literally lived with and getting like a really embarrassing for me co

nflict which everyone was just like scratching their head like what is going on with BOS right now like I look like an unhinged crazy person yeah I remember so I remember the room I remember where I was standing in the room I remember everything about that moment and I I had to go home and be like what the was that like what what happened I'm asking myself like what happened there and uh that was kind of one of the many steps on the journey to recontextualizing what it was uh was not to be right

and to be what to be open-minded and curious and how to engag in conversations I was 22 you I don't make excuses for it now but I remember I there there's there was a couple other examp examples like that in things that were less Technical and more personal that I won't share uh but I remember each of them vividly and I you know those those are the real failures for me I love how the story is like so long ago at this point and still stuck with you and such an impact oh God yeah I'll never forge

t that it was was it was embarrassing and uh for those that's the old quote it's really one of the truest quotes and I know it's cliche and sometimes cliches are cliches because they're good it's like people they don't remember what you said they just remember how you made them feel that's all it's all that's all anyone remembers is how you made them feel and I think in that room I made people feel like unsafe maybe like it was bad you know I like this concept of identity threat uh let call this

podcast episode identity threat I'm just there you go BOS we started this episode with a billion questions I have like a billion in one questions now I wish we can keep going but I know we have to wrap this up is there anything you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round well in the off chance that we do uh end up labeling this episode identity threat let me give you uh what really was I I made a lot of breakthroughs uh with coaching uh learnin

g about the feeling inside my own body when I was feeling that identity threat and uh learning techniques and tactics to reduce the likelihood I would feel it and how to deal with it when it happened and how to repair when it did like I went through all that stuff I would say the greatest lesson I learned would come years later and it was just from observing somebody Ami Vora who was you know legendary longtime came in worked on on our development platform then worked with me on ads for a long t

ime and then was the PM lead for WhatsApp for a long time she's since gone on to do even more great things outside the company working with her it was like working with uh like watching like an alien because she her and I were so different in our approach and she approached she could have the most profound disagreement with somebody in the in the world and they would say the thing that she thought was not just like wrong but like crazy wrong and she would respond she would say fascinating you ha

ve to tell me more more about why you think that and I can't do it justice she meant it like from the core of her being she was like intensely Cur she saw this Schism between her and that person and it could have been personal it could have been professional it could have been anything she saw the Schism and how they saw the world how she saw the world and rather than reacting as if it was a threat that somebody saw it differently or rather than reacting afraid that maybe she was wrong and had d

one things wrong before she reacted with the most genuine and profound curiosity and and I just watched it absolutely tear down walls between points of view people felt immediately her genuine heartfelt curiosity and would lean in and that would cause them to be open-minded and if she was right which by the way she usually was then they would leave being like oh okay I was wrong about that but she also would change her mind and uh that was the key I I really ever since then I just I really have

tried to model that it's just reacting when I have a strong strong internal clench I try to embrace curiosity wow we do not see this thing the same way like that is fascinating tell me why you see that and that could be by personal feedback someone you know someone's like hey bz I don't think you talk enough wow you don't think I talk enough that is that's unexpected like I would love to hear more about that because no one's ever said that to me so I wanted to give that to anybody who to who uh

might recognize this behavior in themselves there's lots of things that you can do uh and and you should do that work uh the work of improving yourself is always fruitful and and satisfying and it's and it pays off as we discuss in every aspect of your life with your family with your friends uh and professionally this is one that I really thought was so great was just curiosity embracing curiosity in those moments of challenge has really completely changed my life and I owe that to Ami wow I lov

e this example it's basically an example of yes and but in a really like no one's goingon to be like yes and it's like a really nice way of saying it just fascinating tell me more fascinating you've got to tell me why how I want to understand it I love that maybe that'll be the new title fascinating there you go anyway with that boss we reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready I'm ready okay first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people th

e dream machine uh which is a tremendous history of uh prehistory really of modern Computing uh extensively following the life of jcr lick lighter but really it's much broader than that is a tremendous missing piece of history in my opinion I think in my discipline in computer science we were not properly educated we learned about Allan touring and we learned about some of the technical underpinnings of computer science theory but the modern computer and the path to it is a a profound and fascin

ating one and it has particular resonance today as JC Li's observation was human in the loop Computing and I think we are now in human in the loop AI I think there's a tremendous uh resonance there the second one is is good inside which is Dr Becky's book and I again I think it's a tremendous parenting book but more than that it does contain lessons for how we think about our own emotions and how we manage those which I find to be useful in any context amazing recommendations she's also got an o

nline community for people that like she's a wonderful online community she's very engaged in it and again for those parents out there you're a little early for this Lenny but you'll get there having little scripts that I'm reading like on Instagram that like when I'm in a moment of tremendous emotional challenge with my children I have the words handy they're just like top of mind for me they they've been cashed in right they're primed is a big game changer this will be for a parenting episode

down the road that's right is there a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed yeah so this is super conventional but Mandalorian so one of the things that's been fun about that is related to my kids again is we watched it with my kids so uh we had a chance to go on the galactic star Cruiser again youall know I am a genuine and true nerd through and through huge fan of Scott trobridge and his work at Star Wars uh in Star Wars lands in Disney and also of that and so before that

we got our kids who are nine and six and watched all the movies together and then we've been watching Mandalorian together as a family and it's a it's super fun uh and it's fun to have that kind of lore connection that so it's not just the Classic kids movies but there's something more and I think for them they feel like it's an adult kind of conversation they get to be a part of so I've really enjoyed that and I think the world of of Dave Fon and John Fabro and the team that's building that uh

that Universe out this is the way this is the way do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates that you're interviewing one of the most important things that I always ask people is uh What uh people who've worked with them would say are their greatest strengths and weaknesses I like this for a couple reasons not least of which is I often do follow up with references and I like to triangulate their awareness of how other people calibrate them and also like how they r

espond to criticism are they saying hey like sometimes candid surprise me they say hey you'll hear this critique a lot for me I don't think it's fair that can be an okay answer but they've got to be pretty robust there or it's like hey this is something I'm working on here's what I'm working on but I also like to hear what they think the superpowers are and too often a lot of attention in in interview is is paid to weaknesses which I care about because I want to know what the downside is but way

more important to me is like what are you awesome at like what is the thing that if I just like I could just hitch a wagon and ride like that's what I want to know like where's like where's the superpower that you like it at and what's funny is people are pretty rarely give by reference checks they're not that often accurate about what the critiques are but they are usually pretty accurate about what their strengths are interesting I'm also a huge proponent of strengths and not worry too much a

bout your weaknesses but asking people to contextualize their performance through the team that's so important we do not achieve very much on our own communication job yeah amazing is there a favorite product that you recently discovered that you love and meta products are acceptable answers the ray van metag glasses would be a tempting answer uh the the multimodal stuff which I'm gonna get in trouble because I've been teasing this for months on social media and it's still a closed Beta And it's

like we're growing the beta slowly but it's like people are really badly want it it was probably one of the most magical things I've like gotten to try recently it's not totally fair it's also not you can buy the r metag glasses and very soon I won't say when but very soon they'll have this capability but it's more fun to think outside of the box all right this is such a this such a uh I'm gonna get in trouble for this answer because it's a bit of a pretentious one I am not a car guy let me say

that right now I don't like cars I don't care about cars like I want a car that works and doesn't like break I grew up all my cars growing up I had over 100,000 miles in them because we only ever had used cars they were constantly breaking down and like I like the power steering would go out while you're driving and you have to like hug the thing or the brakes would go out or You' throw a rod I've done it all so I just wanted a car and so then I drove a a Honda Accord that I bought uh for 10 ye

ars and then I drove a Tesla Model S for 10 years and a Tesla Model S uh had a thing happen to it well it was parked I won't get into that so I had to get a new car and again I'm like I want to get an electric car and uh I was like I'm G get something nice I'm gonna get something nice I I'm driving a uh mercedesbenz AMG eqs and I didn't know cars could be this nice is that I I grew up driving used used cars and like you know whatever I did not know it was possible it is the best augmented realit

y product I think you could buy in the market today uh you know with they have the display it puts your turn in threedimensional space it's got C it's got cameras facing your eyes so it's positioned correctly on this on this display relative to your eyes uh the turn and so when you come up like it's like you're hitting a little wall you got to turn before you hit the wall and I was like oh my God like I think I think this car is great augmented reality so yeah not a car guy and I'm not trying to

flex on this car or whatever it is I like it a lot I didn't know they could be that nice but the thing I thought was so impressive was they did an amazing job with augmented reality in this car wow Mercedes-Benz a player in the augmented reality mixed reality big time they're out there they're they're out there they're the lead I sometimes think about having a contest where I give away products people mention in the segment and now you've blown my budget way way out of ray band Med Ray band met

as you you can afford that that's an amazing I'm going to have to check that out I think we're going to increase some sales for Mercedes next question do you have a favorite Life mod that you often come back to think about share with friends and family find useful yeah we have a funny actually how we came about this The Motto my family has like my immediate family like me my wife and kids is just trust yourself just trust yourself uh actually the reason we have that motto is when we have a house

we have a few nice art pieces and one of them is a Tracy aan a famous uk-based artist and she does neon pieces and it says trust yourself and so it's in our bedroom hallway where me and all the kids and my wife are says trust yourself and every every morning the neon lights up and trust yourself and then uh I we had like a I had the chance to have like a Crest made in the UK my family's English from way back and so we have in the so in the in the crest it says trust yourself and I always talk t

o my kids especially I think um you know I really think people when you're experiencing peer pressure like who do you trust like them or yourself when you're having like a lot of self-doubt and uncertainty like you have to trust yourself I just think so much of the success I've had I think this is probably true of of most people who went to startups and succeeded was like I just had faith that I was making good decisions I mean this comes back to the conviction point I made earlier about uh how

you do things like a Newsfeed or controversial things or how you make big expensive changes just conviction like you have to you have to believe that your eyes ears and an intellect have combined to give you a point of view that has intrinsic value and deserves your respect as opposed to reading that newspaper article about your company and believing over what your own eyes and years have told you um so that's that's the model that we go with and I think it's also important to say you won't alwa

ys be right and that's okay totally that's right you also trusting yourself also includes taking risks because you trust that you can deal and handle with what happens when the risks don't pay out beautiful final question I know that you're a amateur photographer maybe Semi-Pro photographer a lot of travel photograph amateur okay you also have this website that I came across that I don't know if people know about it it's this funny name I'm not going to mention that I don't know if you want peop

le Warden short it's it's an anagram of my name Warden shortbow anagram of Andrew Bosworth yeah Warden short.com yeah I I love photography I love it it's a real passion of mine so here's the question is there what's your favorite photo that you've taken art is actually a great place to talk about trusting Yourself by the way uh and I I know it's cheesy to say it but I think Rick rubin's recent interviews on what art is and how people make it is spoton you have to make it for yourself and you hav

e to love it and if someone else loves it and it finds broader resonance that's awesome uh but that's not always why you do it and if you start to try to do it for broader resonance then you're kind of chasing something else it's a it's it's it's media it's entertainment but it's not art it's some other thing and I say all this to basically tap dance to say I kind of love a lot of my photos like it's very hard to pick a favorite the one that is popping to my head which has more emotional signifi

cance is a picture I took of my son playing in the street in a just jumping in a puddle uh wearing you know kind of a rain boot rain slick kind of a thing and it's it's not sharp it's not in Focus it's like it's a vignette it's an idea and uh I really do think anel Adams talked a lot about uh how the goal of the photographer is to create a capture that expresses to the viewer what it felt like to be there and people forget that he was the master of the dark room much more even more so maybe than

the capture of the print the print was where he like did amazing work and I've had the pleasure to go to his dark room in and uh big sir and and spend time with his son and like watch them do development in that room and he had an elaborate scripts of how he would uh highlight you know would Dodge and burn different parts of the photograph to get it to have the resonance that he wanted and and he fought for photography to be accepted as an artistic medium which it wasn't which I find so resonan

t in today's AI art conversations where once again we're trying to gatekeep what is art and you just don't get to do that unfortunately so this picture of my son no one would call it a technical Marvel but as a vignette of it capturing for me personally but also I think in general for parents the like ephemerality of these tremendously touching Charming human moments that you have with your children that's that's the one that comes to mind amazing we're gonna try to find it and link folks to it

and on the point of Rick Rubin something he says along the same lines is that you think of art as like your diary like I'm just describing what I find interesting and important and nobody can come to me and say my diary is wrong it's my diary this is how I see the world and that's okay and that's where the best art comes from is just and we'll link to this there's an awesome video of him saying exactly this I was recently watching actually BOS this was so much fun I am so thankful they made time

for this I'm looking forward to our parenting and relationships podcast in the future joking not joking two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to follow what you're up to and how can listeners be useful to you sure I'm at BOS tank on Instagram and on threads and also on uh x uh facebook.com/ and uh I also have my own podcast which is uh technical Deep dive so it's pretty different I would say it's a technical deep Dives so try to go deep on one or two topics each time

that's called a boss to the Future you can find that on Spotify or iTunes boss to the Future buy some Quest stuff uh yeah buy get yourself a quest three let's be honest do you treat yourself there you go or these Ray band side glasses I'm a big fan BZ again thank you so much for being here cheers thanks buddy bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a

rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode